Bud Selig finalizes retirement after 2014 season

(USA TODAY) -- Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig will formally announce Thursday he's stepping down after the 2014 season.

Selig,
who took over as interim commissioner in 1992 after owners forced out
then-commissioner Fay Vincent, was named to the permanent job in 1998.
He announced two years ago that the 2014 season would be his last, and
owners believed it this time.

Now, he will formalize the end of
his reign in January 2015. Selig presided over an era of unprecedented
growth - MLB is now a $9 billion industry - but also multiple labor
battles with the players' union, including one that resulted in the
cancellation of the 1994 World Series. And it also spanned the period
loosely known as baseball's Steroid Era, a tag that began to fade once
the league and union collectively bargained for drug testing after the
2002 season, a policy that has gained greater teeth in subsequent
years.

Selig recently has been proud to note that baseball has the toughest drug-testing policy in North America's four major sports.